Garment dumps in the desert: a socio-environmental footprint that expands with each garment

December 1, 2022

Garment dumps in the desert: a socio-environmental footprint that expands with each garment

In the midst of the silence of the desert, more than 1,800 kilometers from Santiago - the capital of Chile - a reality is hidden that no one has wanted to look at carefully, let alone take charge of it. Camouflaged among the dry and bright landscapes lie around 45 clothing cemeteries, which according to the Regional Ministerial Secretariat for the Environment of Tarapacá are part of the 129 illegal landfills found in the area.

Although the first evidence of this disaster began to appear in 2012, it took more than 10 years for both the world and the country to learn what was happening in the solitude of the Northern Pampas. The overproduction of the so-called fast fashion or Fast Fashion (supported by the ultra-fast one) expanded the radius of its impacts, backed by overconsumption, transforming various parts of the world into slaughter areas (Niessen, 2020), that is, in a place that, faced with the false promise of economic development, has compromised not only the ecosystem and the atmosphere, but also the health and well-being of its inhabitants. The first one? Ghana in Africa, syndicated as The landfill of used clothes in rich countries. Unfortunately, this is a reality that is growing exponentially across the globe, affecting more and more human beings, bodies of water, skies, deserts, lands and forms of life.

The Invisible Damage: The Chilean Case

That distant reality that seemed unthinkable in nature sanctuaries began to dye a highly valued one with textiles: the Atacama desert, the driest in the world. In November 2021, Deutsche Welle (DW) uncovered the open secret that was silently plaguing one of the most vulnerable communes in the country, Alto Hospicio.

This city, which was founded informally in June 1987, in the last years of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, originally housed more than 100 families who were transferred from a land grab in the city of Iquique to the desert, 600 meters above sea level. This human settlement, which for years was considered the backyard of the thriving port city, gradually acquired its own identity and officially became a commune on April 12, 2004. Today Alto Hospicio has around 120,000 inhabitants.

Although the hard work of its founders sought to reverse the stigmas associated with its genesis, the migration crisis, the emergence of camps and illegal clothing dumps, are altering their present and threatening turn it into a “pressure cooker” about to explode. But how did fashion become part of the multiple problems that plague the commune? The answer can be found in its neighboring Iquique, whose Free Trade Zone (Zofri) receives 2 million used garments that arrive every week mainly from the United States, Canada and Europe to be sold in the local market or smuggled to Bolivia, a country that is banned from importing them.

According to Patricio Ferreira, mayor of Alto Hospicio, of the total of these pieces only 15% is sold and the rest ends up as garbage giving life to artificial mountains that house approximately 39,000 tons of clothing. Despite this diagnosis, no authority has absolute certainty about these figures, since there is no historical follow-up to this problem, nor have studies been carried out that have accurately measured the impacts. Nothing too far from what is happening in the global fashion industry., where the lack of data does not allow a consensus regarding their environmental and social footprints.

The serious thing in the case of Chile is that one year after this “uncovering”, the situation has literally been covered with dirt before a neighboring population that not only faces the multiple externalities of living with discarded used clothes in their backyard, but with other consequences that are still unsuspected. This is because no one is clear about how the plastic microparticles that emanate from these clothes made mostly of polyester will affect the present and future health of its inhabitants; as well as the smoke from fires that, at least once a year, seek to eliminate the problem by force. Many of these cannot be completely extinguished and end up keeping their combustion underground waiting for the wind to revive them. These silent underground smoke mixes with the chemicals used to disinfect clothes, polluting the sky and the air we breathe, as well as soil and groundwater.

This invisible damage, together with the destruction of the ecosystem associated with the eruption of these textile invaders that strip the local flora and fauna of their habitat, motivated a lawyer from Iquiqueña to file a lawsuit for environmental damage against the Treasury and the Municipality of Alto Hospicio in April 2022, claiming that “there have been systematic negligent behaviors, as well as a risk to people's lives and health due to environmental liabilities in the commune”.

This bustling panorama inevitably reminds us how the disposable clothing business model has been based not only on the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, but also on the people who are part of its value chain, as well as on the towns surrounding its production centers.

This translates into slave and child labor, exposure to pesticides and chemicals, salaries that barely allow survival, long hours of strenuous work, sexual and psychological harassment - just to name the practices most repeated in reports from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Clean Clothes Campaign, United Nations, among others. In addition to the above, there are the various environmental impacts that occur both before and after consumption, and which give rise to greenhouse gas emissions and the carbon footprint that fast fashion carries with it, which begins with the extraction of raw materials and ends up in landfills such as Alto Hospicio.

Every second that passes, a garbage truck full of clothes is incinerated or sent to a landfill.

The diluted footprint: a global case

However, if we leave aside for a moment the social orientation of this phenomenon and this problem, and turn our attention a little to the environmental component behind the industry, we will see that the need for action is also urgent. The environmental impact of fashion can be perceived in three main areas: contamination of water bodies, exploitation of water resources and generation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and it is on the latter that we focus on in this article because it should be noted that This industry is responsible for 10% of total global emissions (McFall-Johnsen, 2020).

Every day it feels as if around the corner there are new trends, new fashions, new collections, new needs; but not only does it seem that way, but it's the reality that we live in. The World Economic Forum reports that in 2000, European fashion companies used to release an average of 2 clothing collections a year, but by 2011, that number had risen to five annual collections, more than the number of seasons that exist on our planet for the same period of time. And if this already sounds like a high amount -and perhaps a little absurd given the temporalities we share-, two of the most representative companies in fast fashion launch between 12 and 24 collections annually (McFall-Johnsen, 2020). The speed of the industry has naturally resulted in the fact that since 2000, the sale of garments has increased from 100 billion units a year to 200 billion; in the same way, The average amount of time spent using them has decreased by 36% (Lai, 2021).

A certain amount of greenhouse gas emissions distributed over 5 years is not the same as those same over 3 months.

According to a sectoral fact sheet on the fashion market in Chile prepared by the Economic and Commercial Office of the Embassy of Spain in Santiago, since 2016, residents of this country have increased on average by 80% of their clothing consumption, from 13 garments per year to 50. This has made Chile the country in South America with the highest consumption of clothing per capita (Iglesias Pérez, 2021). For the same reason, The case of Chile reflects the growth of the sector at the global level, whose excessive acceleration has resulted in 92 million tons of textile waste being produced annually, a figure that is expected to increase to 134 million tons by 2030 (Lai, 2021). It is reported that Every second that passes, a garbage truck full of clothes is incinerated or sent to a landfill (Reichart, 2019). How can this fact be scaled up? Over the course of this text, more than 100,000 kilograms of clothing will have been burned or abandoned.

How can we understand these data in terms of environmental degradation? What does 92 million tons, or 134 million tons of textile waste, entail? Without delving into the excessive use of natural resources that this implies, we have previously addressed the issue of indirect emissions of Scope 3, which are those emissions that come from activities within an organization's value chain.

The carbon footprint refers to the sum of GHG emissions that were involved in the creation or manufacture, processing, distribution, and even disposal of a product or service, that is, all the emissions resulting from activities in the value chain. This means that, in the case of clothing, each garment has its own carbon footprint. Some were made with cotton under a low-intensive and low-mechanized manufacturing scheme, used 50 times by the final buyer and discarded until the fabric was already broken and degraded; others were made with synthetic fabrics, in a conventional maquila, used 3 times and discarded practically intact. This involves a differentiated footprint. However, if the process of creating cotton or synthetic fabric can be similar in terms of resources used, emissions along the value chain of each garment differ in the use and degradation we give them, as well as in the pollution generated from incinerating a synthetic fabric as opposed to incinerating a natural one, or the same pollution resulting from sending a natural fabric to a landfill, as opposed to a synthetic one, which generates less methane emissions (McFall-Johnsen, 2020).

But then What does the carbon footprint of clothing have to do with fast fashion? Although we have already established that each garment has its own carbon footprint, we have not thoroughly addressed the notion that this footprint can have a kind of “distribution” over time. If you have two pairs of pants, some of such quality that they are allowed to be used for years, even decades, and some whose manufacture does not allow them to be kept for more than a couple of years, both will have GHG emissions due to their manufacture and distribution, however, the difference is that longer lasting pants allow their disposal and replacement to be more separated in time from their purchase than lower quality pants. A certain amount of greenhouse gas emissions distributed over 5 years is not the same as those same over 3 months.

Focusing on emissions Downstream of Scope 3 (Diagram 1) one of the categories in this scope is waste disposal, both of those generated in operations and of products sold at the end of their useful life. This last subcategory suggests the generation of GHG emissions associated with Disposal of products, that is, that moment when you stop using a shirt whose fabric is still perfectly functional and you throw it away.

Diagram 1. Simplification of how the value chain of manufacturing a cotton garment is translated to its Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. It seeks to make visible the life cycle of the garment from another perspective other than that of its use, because from this information it is possible to notice how resource, energy and process intensive this cycle is.

The management of the final destination of waste can be carried out in a variety of ways. Perhaps the shipment of waste to recycling or reuse collection centers is integrated into the production process, allowing them to “extend” their life cycle in a certain way - in an ideal case, companies carry out campaigns to collect products after they have been used, allowing them to be recycled or circulated. In other strategies, waste is sent to landfill -where the organic matter present will gradually degrade into methane (CH4) - or else, they are incinerated, causing the fossil waste -such as plastics, some textiles, rubber, liquid solvents and oils- emit carbon dioxide (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2019). Here we must highlight something truly important: when we talk about waste management, we must not only focus on the strategy that is chosen, but also understand what this waste is composed of; talking about incinerating a polyester shirt, a plastic composed of fossil carbon, is not the same as incinerating a linen shirt.

The composition of the textiles matters; whether the garment is made of natural or synthetic fibers, matters. Not only because the execution of the latter involves the use of chemicals, generation of microplastics, and other environmental impacts; but because these materials are essentially derived from plastic, that is, from petroleum. Natural fibers, on the other hand, contain a high content of organic matter. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends in its guidelines for the execution of GHG inventories at the national level that It is assumed that around 40% of textiles are synthetic (IPCC, 2019).

Currently, the fashion industry is responsible for one-fifth of the 300 million tons of plastic produced annually. Where? In the use of synthetic fibers -which are cheaper and allow mass manufacturing- such as polyester, spandex or rayon. Polyester, which is a petroleum-derived plastic, is overthrowing cotton as the basis of textile production (Dottle, 2022).

If it is not possible to ensure waste management that prioritizes reuse first of all, followed by recycling, and finally that takes into account the physical characteristics of waste - such as the amount of organic matter and fossil carbon they have - we cannot talk about responsible waste management. The short cycle between trends and collections results in the accumulation of garments or accessories that are not sold. A highly renowned company within the Fast Fashion reported in the first quarter of 2018 that it had a quantity of unsold assets worth $4.3 billion. This same company has been exposed twice, once for the incineration of 19 tons of discarded garments in Sweden (equivalent to 50,000 pairs of jeans), and once for incinerating 100,000 garments in Germany. The reasons for this can range from fear of “discrediting” the brand by donating the garments or putting them at a discount, to problems in the manufacture of the pieces (Siegle, 2018).

Beyond a desert, there is a planet

The normalization of excessive manufacturing leads to excessive consumption that pollutes open skies, plasticizes aquifers, dries wells, floods deserts, makes people sick and Insensitizes to impact. The lack of traceability of the final destination to which the textile industry undergoes allows there to be no accountability for or by the authorities, whose duty would be to prevent the existence of slaughter areas, while surrounding communities are immeasurably affected, allowing this industry to continue its uphill course but, of course, at the cost of everything.

In this sense, as citizens, it is up to us to analyze how we are relating to clothing and how much of these impacts we are supporting through the impulsive purchase of garments that have not only left a trail of pollution and human exploitation in their production process, but are also threatening our lives.

Chile is definitely one of the most resounding cases in the world about this problem, however, this imprint left in its wake by the textile industry, specifically that of Fast Fashion, is one that is being spent stealthily - sustained by the creation of needs and the infinite idealization of natural resources. Faced with this evidence and the climate crisis we are experiencing, it is imperative to ask ourselves questions about who made our clothes, how, with what materials, under what conditions, under what contexts; and also, to understand that clothing a while ago ceased to be an innocent act and that by prioritizing the bad practices of fast and ultra-fast fashion, we become complicit in their environmental and social footprint, in addition to giving them our vote of confidence, transforming the clothing cemetery of the Alto Hospicio desert into the landscape that, one day, can fill the sky of your house of smoke and flood our plastic ecosystems.

About the authors:

Sofía (@sofcalvo) is a contributor to the blog Toroto. She is a journalist, MBA in Business Management and creator of the Quinta Trends website, specializing in Latin fashion with a focus on sustainability. He loves to travel, read and his refuge of life is writing.

María is a Business Development Coordinator in Toroto. She is a physical engineer at IBERO. He is fascinated by archeology, Mexico, the arts and laughing. He believes that together we can do everything.

References

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